With over two billion active users, social media has seen exponential growth, which is still going on at the whopping rate of 25% every year. This burst of growth has not failed to catch the eye of businesses which now want in badly. Today, about nine out of 10 companies in the U.S. all have an active presence on social media. A huge percentage of those businesses already on the social networks report an increase in exposure and more than 50% of them say that entering the social media space has boosted sales significantly.

Trend Directions for Companies and Businesses

Here are two directions that may or may not come to you as a surprise in 2016 depending on how versed you are on the growing social media trends for companies and other businesses:

Companies turning to Employees for Augmentation

Out of 10 businesses today, nearly eight have a dedicated team set up for their social media presence. However, even with that, many are still struggling for an audience. As the trend takes shape, 2016 is going to witness companies increasingly turning to their employees in an effort to reach a bigger audience. Programs like the employee social advocacy, which persuades staff members to share updates from their company on their social media pages, have grown by close to 200% since 2013.

When planned and executed right, this new trend can return a really impressive payoff, and companies will not only get better, quantifiable results, but also get the chance to expand their social presence dramatically. A recent measure shows that content shared out by the employees acquires eight times more engagement than that which is shared by the company or brand channels. A whole new cohort of tools that will facilitate the sharing of content by employees, for instance that one from Hootsuite, will be of great significance as this trend goes fully fledged in 2016.

Social Networks getting into the Workplace

The promise of a new generation where internal social networks were going to kill emails has been afloat for several years now, and yet emails continue to soldier on. The promise talked about the end to all those endless reply-to-all threads and that hellish hunt throughout the inbox for relevant information. Now as we go well into 2016, the promise appears to be finally arriving.

Slack, with its intuitive interface that has been built around the chat room theme plus its easily searchable archives, has proven to be the thing that can finally fulfill that promise. Within just two years, it has seen more than 1.25 million business users who are all active come on-board, notwithstanding the fact that Slack does already have a substantial pack of competitors still biting at a piece of this pie.

Facebook on the other hand currently has its ‘Facebook at Work’ in trial mode within some selected companies and it might just be released for general use as a freemium this year. If you consider the fact that already most of the world is on Facebook, then the adoption of Facebook at Work can only be expected to soar to equivalent heights as soon as it becomes available.

Want Some More Hints?

Hey, don’t worry. This social media trend hints is not concluded yet. Stop by on Friday, and you will get more clues to help your business run well during this 2016. While on that subject, we will be very happy hearing about how does your companies’ sees social media trends in 2016.